Outlined Notes: “Wings To Awakening”

The Buddha knew that over time that his teachings would get corrupted. Changes in culture, changes in language, misunderstandings, and just plain time would take its toll.

Toward the end of his life the Buddha decided to “encode” his teachings in a list of 7 lists. Each list is equivalent to the other 6 lists. Each list itemizes personal qualities, that if a person endeavors to develop will bring him or her to rediscover the Buddha’s teachings.

This list of lists were know as “The Seven Sets” and as “The Wings To Awakening”:

The 4 Frames Of Reference

The 4 Right Exertions

The 4 Bases Of Power

The 5 Faculties

The 5 Strengths

The 7 Factors Of Awakening

The Noble 8 Fold Path

In his book “Wings To Awakening”, the American born Thai Buddhist monk Thanisarro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff) presents an introduction to each of these lists and to Buddhism by describing these lists using an anthology of Buddhist discourses.

I read the book in the 1990s and created typed, outlined notes from the 1996 printed book edition of “Wings To Awakening”. The state of computer technology was not what it is today. The notes were originally in plain text format. Later on I put the notes in Word Perfect 7 and Word 6.

Now it is the year 2016. I have once again reformatted the notes ( and cleaned up a lot of errors ). This time into Open Document Format (*.odt) which any organization is free to implement, being readable almost anywhere. The most famous application for this is Libre Office ( Open Office ) available for free of charge on all of the major operating systems ( Windows, IOS, Linux, Unix ). Given the improvements in software I was able to put the notes into a real outline mode and to save the notes as PDF. These PDF files are listed below in a format similar to the table of contents to the book. To get a copy of the book in various formats please read “About The Notes” or go here.